How to write a successful book

Lindsey sits down with the folks at Cosmopolitan to talk top writing tips.

You’ve obviously been writing for quite some time now, is there anything that you know now that you wish you’d known when you started?

It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. When you’re doing it as your passion and as your hobby, it’s like, ‘Oh this is a super fun thing I do when I get home from my shitty job’. Or I’d think, ‘my work was really hard today so I’ll go home and write and that’ll be nice’ whereas when you suddenly have a deadline and it’s your JOB, and there are days when you’ve just got nothing in you and no words to come out, and it just becomes incredibly incredibly stressful.
That’s when you have to take yourself outside of yourself and tell yourself that it’s good that this is my job and that I’m not teaching four year-olds maths or something.

I should be very very thankful that I have not ACTUALLY become an accountant, which would have killed me. So it’s just that when your passion becomes your actual job then you don’t think about how difficult that’s gonna be, because it can take all the fun out of it.

How do you focus? Do you have any writing essentials?

I am incredibly unhealthy. I tend to write massive batches, so I’ll do like ten thousand words in a weekend and when it gets towards the end it’s like fifteen thousand words a day, and I get in a zone with it and I can’t stop, so all I have is Diet Pepsi and Sour Patch Kids. It’s NOT right! I mainly just have to get away from the TV. I’ve got like a writing playlist on my iPod that’s got four or five hours of my favourite songs.

Oh, so you listen to music while you write?

I do, but I can only listen to music if I’m not on super super deadline, because when I’m on a super super deadline I have to be like silent. Nothing. Laptop – that’s it, but yeah I do listen to music when I get home.

Any particular favourites?

I just have a really unhealthy obsession with The Nationals which I’ve got to stop talking about it because they’re gonna put a restraining order out on me… I love them, and I listen to them all day. And Caron StanilandI I listen to a lot. It’s weird that some music… it gets… like intrusive? So it gets in your brain and you’re trying to write but it’s like ‘I’m listening to this song’. I like Kamron Stewart, Tegan and Sara, umm, I love a bit of Motown, too…